1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to packet based communication technologies, and in particular, to congestion control for packet communications.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Advances in telecommunication technologies have pushed the telecommunication industry towards what is commonly referred to as convergence. An example of an important advance is packet based telephony, sometimes referred to as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP carries voice communications in a similar format as common data services, such as e-mail. Thus, voice services, which were once provided over separate legacy networks, have now converged with data services.
Several drawbacks exist related to the provisioning of packet based telephony services when compared to the capabilities of legacy networks. In the past, legacy networks included multiple levels of control processes to prevent network failure in the event of extremely high calling events or periods of congestion. Similarly, the same control processes worked to prevent network failure in the case of severely degraded capacity in the signaling and bearer portions of the networks. Unfortunately, packet based telephony networks do not provide comparable capabilities to control potential network failure events.
In particular, packet based telephony networks lack call push-back capabilities. Call push-back is required when, for example, a mass calling event occurs. To prevent legacy switches and other network elements from overloading, incoming call requests are either ignored or denied, or the call processing pace is slowed down. In addition to lacking call push-back capabilities, legacy networks and packet based networks lack the capability to correlate control processes to adequately handle mass calling events.